


Breakfast in the Silent World

by lwise2019



Series: Mikkel's Story [3]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 07:35:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21316528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lwise2019/pseuds/lwise2019
Summary: The team awakens for the first morning in the Silent World, and Mikkel makes breakfast and remembers...This followsFirst Night
Series: Mikkel's Story [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536739
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Breakfast in the Silent World

The proximity alarm woke them all up but Sigrun was fastest out of her bunk, darting to the door to check the intruder. “All right, the door's open. You can come in,” she informed the door in Norwegian. “Scout's back,” she added for the benefit of the others, returning to collect her outer clothing. Mikkel, who had resolved in the late night's darkness not to become annoyed, became annoyed. He had already pointed out once to her that Lalli didn't understand any Scandinavian language.

Suppressing a sigh, he put on a neutral expression and merely answered, “Good. Stay put. I'll make sure he's decontaminated.” Scooping up the decontamination equipment, he opened the door for Lalli, who had not thought to try to open it.

The scout was almost preternaturally perceptive, and one look at Mikkel's face told him the other was annoyed. He cringed and tried to rush past to the safety of the main section of the tank, being brought up short as Mikkel caught him by his collar and pulled off his jacket, spraying it with the decontamination chemicals while simultaneously fending off Tuuri, who had worried long into the night about her young cousin and now earnestly wished to fling her arms around him in joy at his safe return. She had, at least, put on her mask before approaching but was about to pull it off when Mikkel stopped her, pointing out that they didn't _know_ what might be on his clothing.

“Oh, come on,” Sigrun objected, “what do you think she'll do, run over and lick the jacket? I'm pretty sure nobody in the history of humanity has become infected just by breathing near possibly compromised clothing.”

Mikkel knew this was likely true; nine decades of tragic experience and cautious experimentation had shown that the Rash survived less than five minutes on a surface if exposed to the sun and less than twenty in the shade in warm weather, and even less in cooler weather such as they were experiencing. The Rash could not attack through intact skin and so was dangerous only if it could get into the mucous membranes of the nose or mouth or into the bloodstream through a cut or bite.

Still, it was important to him – important to all of them, he believed – that Sigrun view him as competent, reliable, and willing to follow orders. The sponsors had set out a protocol for dealing with anyone who had been out of sight of the tank and he meant to follow it until Sigrun, as captain of the expedition, ordered him not to. “Doesn't matter. It's protocol. It's either this or we make him stand outside in the sunlight for an hour.”

Lalli didn't understand any of the discussion but clearly understood what was expected of him. He stripped off his outer clothing and passed it to Mikkel to be pushed into the UV cabinet, submitted to being sprayed with decontamination chemicals, and even submitted to Tuuri's welcoming embrace as Mikkel departed to fix the team's breakfast.

Stirring the porridge, listening with half an ear to Tuuri and Lalli discussing the map in incomprehensible Finnish, Mikkel thought about the Rash as he had so many times before.

The Rash was not terribly contagious. It was nothing like so contagious as measles, a disease he knew of only from reading as the surviving communities had been too small and too widely separated to sustain it and it had gone extinct within months after the Rash appeared. The Rash was not even so contagious as smallpox, he thought, which the Old World had managed to eradicate decades before the Rash struck.

If the Rash had only infected humans, he mused, the Old World could have survived through quarantines and curfews; it would have been badly damaged but it could have survived. It was their misfortune that the Rash had infected every type of mammal except, strangely, cats, and it had been impossible to stop its spread through mice, rats, squirrels, and the rest of the mammalian class. The only non-immune survivors were human beings and their domesticated animals on a few islands and in mountain fastnesses – and even they could survive only through rigorous and often brutal quarantines.

If the Rash had merely killed every creature it infected, the Old World would surely have fallen, but the survivors could have returned from their refuges to the mainland a few generations later. The Danes would not have needed to send an army to reclaim Denmark, Mikkel thought, and the army would not have perished. He checked his hands, and they were not shaking. Not shaking at all.

> Mikkel looked at his hands. They were shaking. He was so cold, and so very tired, and dawn was still over an hour away. He had been on the night watch for ten days now and he was weary.
> 
> He rested the shotgun on the barricade and cautiously flexed the fingers of one hand and then the other. They were cold and stiff but he could fire the shotgun if he needed to. He couldn't hit the broad side of a barn – he had failed every marksmanship test – but when a swarm of grosslings attacked, he had only to point the shotgun in the right direction and he was sure to hit _something_.
> 
> Movement caught his eye and the shotgun twitched toward it. A fireman had tossed an incendiary on the body of the latest grossling and was sprinting back to the barricade, but something with far too many legs had lunged out of the woods, moving fast enough to catch the fireman before it was in range of the shotguns – 
> 
> Crack!
> 
> Even through his earplugs the marksman's rifle was loud. The grossling staggered a few more steps then collapsed, and the fireman ran a few more steps himself, stopped, turned, and bravely ran back to toss an incendiary on that body too before racing back to the barricade. A cheer, audible even through earplugs, rose from the soldiers who welcomed him back.
> 
> The soldiers stood guard behind a chest-high barricade that surrounded the base; outside the barricade was a moat of light and ashes. The light came from large arrays of powerful bulbs mounted on wooden towers and powered by generators, and the ashes were the results of three weeks of nightly grossling attacks. While grosslings generally stayed wherever they happened to be, they were attracted to loud noises such as those caused by the construction of the base during the day and the fighting by night. The captain claimed that they had lured in and wiped out every mobile grossling within ten kilometers – but still more grosslings attacked every night. Some of the soldiers believed that they were also attracted to the artificial lights, that in some dim way the grosslings remembered when such lights meant home. Mikkel shuddered at that thought.
> 
> The klaxon sounded behind him: the lookouts had spotted a swarm. Mikkel flexed his fingers again, checked his shotgun, peered out at the woods beyond the lights. Things were moving there; things were crawling, slithering, oozing forward into view: masses of corruption both horrifying and pitiful.
> 
> The marksmen were firing now, but there were too many for them and the swarm was moving into shotgun range. With the rest of the soldiers, Mikkel opened fire.

Tuuri and Lalli were quiet now and Emil was regarding him oddly. He had missed something, Mikkel realized. Sigrun held out her bowl: “Well?” Ah, the porridge was ready. He served them all except Lalli who seemed to have fallen asleep, and the team settled down to breakfast and the new day.


End file.
